[…]Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music. None of this protected her nine-year old daughter Louise from sexual abuse at the hands of a neighborhood predator. This event had a major influence on Brooks’ life and career, causing her to say in later years that she was incapable of real love, and that this man “must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure….For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough – there had to be an element of domination”.[2] (When Brooks at last told her mother of the incident, many years later, her mother suggested that it must have been Louise’s fault for “leading him on[…]